Roaming with AT&T or Verizon in Canada is costly.
Roaming with any of the U.S. carriers including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T in Canada is quite costly. Let's look at some alternative ways to save you money. Let's take a look into some smart steps you can take before traveling through Canada with your United States cell phone.
IMPORTANT NOTE — Not taking these steps will most likely be followed by a VERY HEFTY cellular bill.
There are a few things one needs to know about using your cell phones or not shutting off all the data when you're traveling on the Alaska Highway in Canada. In an emergency, most carriers phones will connect up including those serviced by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint cellular, and others. While the cellular coverage along the Alaska Highway is getting better, you must remember that with all of these carriers, your American contracts switch over to international calling data and additional roaming charges will be incurred if used in Canada. Those charges can be really steep if you haven't set up some prior plan with your service provider.
Cell Calls — To avoid roaming charges in Canada on any phone calls with AT&T or Verizon you need to first call your provider and switch to an international plan PLUS go into the settings and turn off the “data roaming” option on all phones.
Data Usage — Not much to say here, to avoid the very expensive data roaming charges in Canada you once again need to once again contact your provider and add on an international data plan but still be carefully as these plans are in Megabytes not Gigabytes so all the data can be consumed relatively fast just by the phones app's constantly updating themselves.
- 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1000 Megabytes so a 1 Megabyte plan is only 1/5000 of a typical lower end monthly data package in the United States.
- The basic international data plan from Verizon is
The Cure For Invisible Data Usage — Forget to turn that phone to airplane mode and all of your favorite app's will be continuing their updating and running up that data usage at an astronomical rate.
- NOTE — Many people have incurred very large data charges even when switching Data Roaming to the off position. Seems this is not enough to stop all data on many app's. There are only two positive ways to control this, switching to Airplane Mode or shutting the phone off all together.
CHECKLIST — Make sure you talk to your cell service provider before you leave on your trip through Canada.
Contact the or find us on Facebook.